Mid Century Child

From Ollywiki

I was one of the ones who lived through it. The great modernization. It pulsed across the landscape, a circular shock wave of obliteration, like after a nuclear detonation over Bikini Atoll or someplace like that, wiping out the very colour of everything that had existed there, the smell of the earth, the trill of the spring peepers in the ditches, the skeins of swallows strung along telephone wires as summer wended into autumn. All of it gone in less than a decade. Yes there were some ruins around for awhile. A weathered grey barn in the lee of the highway on ramp. The skeleton of a vineyard behind a new filling station. And everywhere the great standing corpses of the elm trees, their limbs slowly collapsing from a strange new fungus. Orchards uprooted. The bleeding red earth.